Various Artists

This Ain't Chicago: The Underground Sound of UK House and Acid 1987-1991

Lovingly compiled by Padded Cell's Richard Sen, This Ain't Chicago offers a snapshot of a key era in UK dance muisc, forgoing obviously choices for a clutch of tunes largely forgotten by history.

Sometimes a tune is like a wormhole leading to a whole new dimension: When Chicago house artist Marshall Jefferson released "The Jungle" (under the moniker Jungle Wonz) in 1986, he unleashed a startling expansion of what house music could be, what it could mean. "The Jungle" sounds like its name, a dense collage of deep house bass, eerie keyboards, rippling percussion, and an otherworldly flute solo, abandoning house's imperatives to jack, to cruise, or to score in favor of spacing out and dreaming.

"The Jungle", together with the work of fellow dreamer Larry Heard (Mr. Fingers), cast the spell that This Ain't Chicago: The Underground Sound of UK House and Acid 1987-1991 explores. During the timeframe covered by this 2xCD set, the U.S. continued to advance the borders of house's music interplanetary eccentricity (most notably on releases by New York's Nu Groove Records). But This Ain't Chicago makes the case that UK producers and audiences not only embraced this otherworldly vision of house, they thought this was what house was. Arguably, this creative misinterpretation of the style's operating principles reflected chemical rather than stylistic concerns, with the influence of ecstasy on UK dancefloors de-prioritizing sex and elevating blissed-out self-exploration. It's a story you've probably heard before, but the UK's distorted reception of U.S. dance music is better remembered for what it ultimately led to ("Madchester" indie, rave, IDM, and so on) than for the initial impact of producers trying to create their own version of the Chicago sound, the traces of which are confined to a sprinkling of chart successes and an equally limited handful of tunes now engrained in dance music's canon.

Lovingly compiled by Padded Cell's Richard Sen, This Ain't Chicago passes over these obvious choices-- A Guy Called Gerald's "Voodoo Ray"or 808 State's "Pacific State", say-- in favor of a clutch of tunes largely forgotten by history. It's a welcome move, given that the inclusions are so frequently excellent. Bang the Party's "Bang Bang You're Mine" (1990), all floating snares, drifting bongo patterns, and enervated soul falsetto, sounds as much like the contemporaneous dream-pop of A.R. Kane as it does Adonis; more so, in fact, than A.R. Kane's own attempts at house music. Meanwhile, the deep house of Julian Jonah's "Jealousy and Lies" (1988) builds on the blueprint of Mr. Fingers' "Mystery of Love", offering a calmly delivered relationship psychodrama over scintillating snare patterns and abstracted reversed synth washes. Even if these tracks don't better their Chicago forefathers, it's almost inexplicable that they've been denied the retrospective treatment until now.

Inevitably, at times This Ain't Chicago shades into new sounds emerging from the fertile melting plot of club and rave sounds during the collection's utterly transformative five-year time frame, most remarkably on Ability II's "Pressure Dub" (1991), nominally a bleep techno tune, but in truth an astonishingly prescient 10-minute dub-house soundworld of refracting echoes. There are also, as the compilation's subtitle suggests, several tunes that cop the burbling "acid" 303 synthesizer bassline from made famous by Phuture's Chicago house classic "Acid Tracks". Appropriately stripped down and ominous, but lacking some of the ostentatious flair that distinguished 808 State's late-80s acid house efforts, these mostly comprise the set's less interesting moments.

It's this sense of fearless overreach that unites This Ain't Chicago's best moments, with producers capitalizing on house's additive structure by piling on every trick they can think of to create top-heavy epics of bristling sonics and contradictory moods. By the early 90s, house (in the UK and U.S. alike) was cleaning up and smoothing out in contrast to rave, understanding better, perhaps too well, the appeal of the endless groove at its heart. But in music, getting it wrong can be as productive as getting it right, and at their best, This Ain't Chicago's mistakes remain thrilling.